BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – One morning earlier this month, Mike Slive rose as usual at 10 till 5. A little later, in the moments before leaving to start the workday, he sat down and jotted a few lines on a yellow legal pad.

The Southeastern Conference commissioner outlined his schedule for the day. He mentioned his escalating excitement over the impending launch, one day later, of the SEC Network. He wrote that he had enjoyed the previous evening. He explained how much he was looking forward to his plans for that night. He finished, simply, with: "I cherish you."

For more than 10 years, the daily notes to his wife, left on the kitchen counter just before he slips out the door, have been part of the daily routine for one of the most powerful people in college athletics. In the notes, Slive details his agenda — and reveals his passion.

"It's very cool," says Liz Slive, Mike's wife of 46 years. "It's a very special tradition."

From his perch as commissioner of one of college sports' most tradition-rich — and especially lately, just plain rich — leagues, Slive has played a significant role in shaping the agenda for nearly every important issue in what is unquestionably a critical period for college athletics.

"When you look at everything we're dealing with," he says, "I do think this is an historic moment. ... Right now, we're all witnesses to history."

But Slive has been less a witness and more a change agent in — and this is only a partial list — the creation and implementation of the College Football Playoff, the achievement of increased autonomy for the Power Five conferences, and the ascendance of his own league, on and especially off the field. He describes his role as a "steward" of college athletics, a guardian of the game, but others note those lofty goals almost always seem to align neatly with the best interests of the SEC.

Regardless, Slive is a 74-year-old, recovering workaholic with no plans to retire. When asked about his accomplishments, Slive's response is essentially a shrug. He'd prefer to talk about his marriage to Liz. Or the achievements of his daughter, Anna. Or — and this is when he really lights up — how he dotes on his 2-year-old granddaughter, Abigail. And he might just fight back tears as he does.

Powerful leader

The mild persona is a far cry from the perception. Along with Jim Delany, his counterpart and sometime rival as the Big Ten's commissioner, Slive is regarded as one of the two most powerful leaders in college athletics. Together, they command influence well beyond their actual titles.

Earlier this summer, during a break in the annual meetings of the Collegiate Commissioners Association in Dana Point, California, Slive and Delany approached two reporters and tag-teamed their way through an impromptu but very intentional interview. A few days later, Delany would testify for the defense in O'Bannon vs. the NCAA.

Their message during the conversation with the reporters, essentially, was a spirited defense of the "collegiate model" — which Slive, his voice rising, described as "an enormously valuable piece of our American culture" — and of their attempt, through increased autonomy for their conferences and the ACC, Big 12 and Pac-12, to modify but preserve it by providing athletes with unprecedented benefits.

"We are in an evolutionary mode, appropriately so," Slive said. "We've put the student-athlete at the forefront of where this evolution should move."

A few moments later, the commissioners returned to meetings with the commissioners of the other 30 conferences that make up the NCAA's Division I — and successfully pressed home their point: Give us the power to regulate ourselves.

According to others in the meetings, Slive was forceful and direct, but never raised his voice. It tracked with more general descriptions of Slive's leadership style, which include words and phrases like communicator, listener and consensus-builder. But a measured demeanor belies — or perhaps enhances — his undeniable clout.

"People from the outside look at him running this multi-million dollar corporation and think, 'What a shrewd businessman,'" says Louisville athletics director Tom Jurich, who worked directly with Slive when the school was a member of Conference USA and Slive was that league's commissioner. "But he's such a family man."

'The golden age'

Slive likes to note that during his dozen years as SEC commissioner, SEC teams have won dozens of national championships in 15 sports, but football has been the primary driver, winning seven consecutive crystal footballs, and just missing an eighth when Florida State nipped Auburn in the final seconds last January. "The game," Slive is fond of saying, "was just a minute too long."

The league's annual revenue sharing has increased from $95.7 million since Slive's arrival in August 2002 to $309.6 million in 2013-14. The current figure does not include funds from the SEC Network, which when launched Aug. 14 was beamed into more homes than any other startup network in cable history — and which is estimated to produce an exponential revenue increase.

Fueled by an extraordinary fusion of passion and performance, there's no reason to suspect the SEC's success will wane soon, either on or off the field. Slive calls it "the golden age of the SEC," and attributes it to a variety of factors. But others attribute much of the success to Slive's leadership.

"He has really built them into something that is really special," Jurich says.

And former Ole Miss chancellor Robert Khayat, who led the search to replace then-SEC commissioner Roy Kramer back in 2002, says of Slive: "I think he was born to have this job."

But you might not think so, given Slive's background. A native of Utica, New York, Slive seemed an odd fit for a league that had traditionally stuck close to its roots in a region that takes immense pride in a shared heritage. Kramer, for example, was a former Vanderbilt athletics director. Other commissioners had been tied to the league, as well.

Slive, by contrast — and as described by his daughter, Anna Slive Harwood — is "an Ivy League-educated, Jewish Yankee lawyer who doesn't play golf."

One day in the early 1970s, the phone rang at the Slive house in Hanover, New Hampshire. Walter Peterson, New Hampshire's governor, was on the other end of the line.

Slive was practicing law and serving as a district judge. Peterson wanted Slive to consider accepting a position as a superior court judge. The offer was tantalizing to the young couple. It would have meant more money, and down the road, the retirement pay would have been 75 percent of his salary.

Mike turned it down, because it would have entailed frequent trips to other countries.

"It was too much travel," Liz says — and more than 40 years and countless thousands of miles later, they both laugh.

Slive's official biography shows that before he became the SEC commissioner in 2002, he was an assistant athletics director at Dartmouth, his alma mater where he had played lacrosse. An assistant executive director at the Pac-10. Athletics director at Cornell. Commissioner of the Great Midwest Conference and then Conference-USA.

"You get to 74, a lot of things have happened," he says.

But the bio barely scratches the surface.

Slive dabbled as a sports agent, representing former Dartmouth great Reggie Williams during his NFL career. At the Pac-10 — a job he took for $28,000, a significant pay cut from what he was making as an attorney — he collaborated with Yeager (who was then a member of the NCAA's enforcement staff) in investigating allegations of academic fraud that eventually resulted in five of the league's schools being placed on probation.

Drawing from those experiences, Slive essentially invented the practice of NCAA infractions law in the 1980s, beginning in New Hampshire when a school — he won't say which — called looking for help. An assistant athletics director at the school knew of his experience, both inside athletics departments and, at the Pac-10, as an investigator, "and it just sort of grew from there," Slive says.

In 1986, Slive joined a friend's law firm in Chicago, then recruited Mike Glazier, who had just left the NCAA's enforcement staff, to join him. A couple of weeks later, they were representing Oklahoma State as it faced allegations of rule violations. A couple of weeks after that, Texas A&M wanted help, too.

"All of the sudden, I had plenty to do and Mike had plenty to do," says Glazier. "We certainly didn't have a business plan, that's for sure."

During four years together, they appeared before the Committee on Infractions more than a dozen times. Glazier, who has long been considered the most notable figure in the niche practice, says he always had a sense Slive would move on to something else.

Not long after the firm worked to help found the Great Midwest Conference, the fledgling league hired Slive as commissioner. Four years later, the Great Midwest morphed into Conference USA — finally setting him more directly on the path to Birmingham and to the SEC.

"I think Mike used the things he learned in his past — attorney, judge, conference commissioner, being an athletic director — he rolled all of those things into one," Jurich says.

Loving legacy

Before all of that, though, Slive was a meat-cutter — a member of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, Local District 1. He worked during college at the local grocery and filled in during holidays for vacationing butchers. (Even now, according to his daughter Anna, Slive takes pride in carving the family's turkey at Thanksgiving. "A work of art," she says.)

One summer, along with a college classmate, Slive laid concrete in Los Angeles' extensive drainage system — the Los Angeles River. To help pay his way through law school at Virginia, he delivered laundry, and says: "Work ethic and a healthy fear of failure were the driving forces in my life."

Liz has been another driving force. They met when he was a freshman at Dartmouth and she was 13, a freshman at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, New York. He took her to Coney Island and, she says, tried to kiss her. They dated off and on for several years, then married in 1968.

"People ask me about my legacy," Mike Slive says. "My legacy is being married to a wonderful woman, and we have a fantastic daughter and now we have a wonderful grandchild."

Says Liz: "I don't think either of us ever expected to be as joyfully happy in our lives as we are now."

And each morning, in the routine he started soon after they moved to Birmingham, he writes to Liz on that yellow legal pad, a combination of itinerary and what he calls "special, personal things." Sometimes, he'll add a stick-figure drawing of a man smoking a cigar. They've kept them all.

"I call them the love letters of their lives," Anna Slive Harwood says. "That's who he is. That's what people don't see. Forty-six years, they've been married — you don't get stuff like that everyday."

The move to the SEC came with another phone call, this one from Khayat. After all those moves, the Slive family had finally put down roots. They'd been in Chicago 16 years, and were content. Slive says he left it up to Liz and would have been fine if she'd been against another move. But as Khayat talked with Mike about the possibilities, Liz asked to speak with him. The Mississippian greeted her with: "Hey girl ..."

"It was like magic," she says. "He swept me off my feet."

Not long afterward, they were headed to Birmingham, to what Liz Slive calls "the best job in the world for someone in college athletics."

Spurning a phenomenon

The SEC chose Slive after interviewing five candidates. The job was daunting; in 12 years as commissioner, Kramer, who is credited with creating the Bowl Championship Series, had left big shoes. Under his watch, Arkansas and South Carolina had joined the league. He had negotiated a landmark TV deal with CBS. But under Slive's leadership the league has grown to another level, from a regional passion to a national phenomenon.

"He realized, I think better than I did, the potential that sports in the South had nationally and internationally," Khayat says.

Among his initial aims was to foster a culture of compliance with NCAA rules. When he arrived, nine of the league's 12 schools were either on probation, under investigation, or somewhere between. Slive set a goal that within five years, no school would be on probation. When that date arrived, in 2008, only one was, and at least publicly, Slive had driven home the message:

"If you break rules, you're not gonna be welcome in the family."

He is also proud of the league's record in minority hiring. When he arrived, the SEC had not had a black head football coach; Sylvester Croom's hiring in 2003 was, he says, "a historic moment." Even better, when Derek Mason was hired at Vanderbilt last offseason, replacing James Franklin, their race was "not a story."

After a 7-5 vote by athletics directors on an issue shortly after his arrival, Slive asked Doug Dickey, then Tennessee's athletics director, whether he should be concerned.

Whether that's true or not, one way Slive has governed is by taking very few votes. His method, with coaches, athletics directors, presidents — and sometimes, in meetings with other commissioners — is to build consensus. He prepares for important agenda items like an attorney would for a jury trial, determining the desired outcome and then working backward, anticipating arguments and building counter-arguments.

"He knows where he wants to go," Auburn athletics director Jay Jacobs says. "He does it without ever raising his voice. I've never been in a meeting with anybody more prepared than he is. He's thought through it all. ... Whatever decision is made, he supports it like it was his idea."

Usually, because it was. But Jacobs has experienced Slive's stick, too.

"You don't want to get a call from him about a recruiting violation or something someone on your staff has done to embarrass the league," Jacobs says. "Those aren't pleasant."

Slive's public comments are generally careful. He is regularly accessible for interviews — he did almost 100, for example, during the SEC's recent football media days — and maintains friendly relationships with many reporters. But if much of what he says appears calculated, it's because it has been.

"There's nothing that's off the cuff," says Anna Slive Harwood, who has long helped her father prepare for speeches. His annual "State of the SEC" address, delivered at the league's football media days, might undergo more than a dozen drafts. Last May, during a news conference at the league's spring meetings, he suggested that the Power 5 conferences might need to explore a "Division IV." It wasn't a slip of the tongue; Slive believed the push for autonomy needed a little extra oomph.

"That was a little disconcerting for some in the group (of other Division I conferences)," Yeager says. "But he doesn't throw it around flippantly. ... I can understand if he felt there was kind of a need to throw down the gauntlet."

A few weeks later, at the CCA meetings in Dana Point, Slive continued to push the message, but in a soft-spoken, friendly manner.

"You know where he stands on stuff," Yeager says. "It's not gonna be shouting. It's gonna be, 'That's not gonna work for us. We'll have to think of something else, because that won't fly.' ... He's got a very firm streak where he can just say without (making anyone angry), 'This is the way it's gonna be.' He's always very measured."

And most often, it seems, he has gotten his way.

Flipping the switch

In almost every interview these days, the question inevitably comes: How much longer will Slive keep doing it?

He continues to keep a full schedule — rising early, taking meetings with his lieutenants by 6:30 a.m. at a Starbucks near his home, or sometimes at Salem's Diner, where he's a regular and something of a star, or occasionally on the back porch. He rarely eats lunch, preferring to work through it. When he returns home late in the afternoon, he unwinds by making dinner (which sometimes means making tuna sandwiches), then doing the dishes — and then he'll smoke a cigar on the back porch, staring out at the view of the Alabama hills. He'll read a while (two books at a time, usually history or historical fiction, but only "two pages a night," Liz Slive says), fall asleep and then do it again the next day.

"He only has two speeds," Anna Slive Harwood says, "'high' and 'off.'"

When Slive will flip the switch for good, though, isn't certain. With the launch of the SEC Network, the advent of the playoff and the achievement of autonomy, it seems sometime soon might be a good time to leave the difficult decisions of the future to others. Slive might be playing coy, but he insists he has no firm timetable.

"I'll be done when I'm done," he says. "When they don't want me anymore or when I don't want to be there."

Whenever he retires, Slive says he would do even more with Abigail. He and Liz have talked about driving trips through the South — visiting Civil War sites, traveling the Natchez Trace, doing more work with the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. They might do yoga, take some adult education courses, just spend more time together.